In
August, Pittsburgh’s 27-year-old mayor, Luke Ravenstahl, along with
his wife and some friends, hopped into a GMC Yukon and went to see a Toby
Keith concert. Turns out it’s a sort of double-secret-probation-mobile,
purchased with a federal homeland security grant and assigned to a police
“intelligence unit.” Questions arise. Politically: Why does
Pittsburgh have a 27-year-old mayor? Aesthetically: Why does he listen
to Toby Keith? Ontologically: Why is Toby Keith? Practically: What
the fuck kind of intelligence do you gather tooling around the hilly neighborhoods
of an old steel town only now on the uncertain cusp of a modest economic
recovery in a 5,500 lb., 5.7-liter, 320-bhp V8?

The Yukon, meanwhile, has gotten itself one of those
permanent modifiers: Just as you can’t say “Muqtada al-Sadr”
without “Radical Shiite Cleric,” you can’t mention the
troublesome truck without adding the Homeland Security prefix. The price
tag is also a popular adjectival appendage. Forty-five grand, give or
take. The federal grant that paid for it came in the amount of $59,000,
which compels us to ask: Where did the rest of that money go, and can
we get some decent rims?

Ravenstahl has elsewhere and otherwise been prone to
embarrassing transgressions of political decorum, which is as you’d
expect from a kid his age. I say that as a kid his age. Were I in his
shoes, that truck would’ve come back with a lot worse than “barbecue
stains,” as goes the current allegation. Pittsburgh chose to reelect
the dumb stooge, and who am I, at last, to contend with the Triumph of
the Will of the People? And yet a certain irony—at least, a disconnect—underlies
our ongoing scandale. If the mayor’s personal outing violated
the terms of the vehicle’s proper use, then what precisely are those
terms? What constitutes proper use?

That is the rub. These Homeland Security SUV mini-scandals
are common these days—Buffalo had its own too, with public officials
using similarly purchased SUVs for “personal use.” But again—what
would constitute “official” use?

The answer is that no one seems entirely sure. Our US
Attorney, Mary Beth Buchanan, more widely known for her quixotic (by which
we mean Javertian) pursuit of various porn purveyors, is looking into
possible improprieties, and within the police department at least one
whistle-blowing type has suggested that the federal money came with “strings
attached.” By which we mean that the feds could conceivably issue
some sort of take-back, although frankly with the way SUVs bleed blue-book
value from the minute they roll their fat asses off the lot, the federal
grantmakers come out the losers in any such scenario.

Mayor Luke isn’t a smart man. He’s not even
a smart boy. He’s certainly no disestablishmentarian. Lord Jesus
and his choirs of mewling angels know that no man who takes his wife to
the homosocial proving grounds of a Toby Keith stadium show is angling
to heighten any fucking contradictions or subtly undermine the operations
of the global gulag by exposing its operations as a vicious—and
expensive—fraud. Yet the truth is that the absurdities of the system
are often better exposed by its exemplars than by its harshest, most insightful,
and most incisive critics. For a hundred years, for instance, America
has pursued empire abroad, and for all that time wits, wildmen, professors,
aberrant congresscreatures, celebrities, street-corner preachers, secular
saints, columnists, madmen and militiamen alike have cursed it and hurled
invective against it. But who has done more to expose its failings to
the broad, broadening, and bovine public than America’s imperial
apotheosis, George W. Bush?

The unintentional aftermath of our mayor’s high-rollin’
car-pool scam has been the further transformation of Homeland Security,
both the Department of and the Idea of, into more of a joke. Pittsburgh
is a town of deep affections but few pretensions, and the idea that a
terrorist would ever choose it as a target strikes everyone as more than
a little ridiculous. Now the bemused question lingers over water-cooler
conversations: Supposing Al-Muslim bin-Nazifascist, having finally realized
that the Steelers are America’s team now, decides to blow himself
up in a crowd of vastly overweight tailgaiters in the far lots of Heinz
Field—supposing he does, what on earth will ownership of a big ugly
truck contribute? And if nothing, then who really cares if the mayor wants
to use it to cruise for pussy, listen to bad country music, or run over
small animals?

Mencken said that a belly-laugh is worth a thousand syllogisms,
and to the extent that minds change at all, I wouldn’t argue. Unfortunately,
even the mild transformative power of laughter and ridicule is inadequate
to the challenge of changing minds enough. Mencken watched Darrow
turn William Jennings Bryan and his biblical certainty into a laughingstock,
but lo these many years later the population of Tennessee is still more
inclined to think that man is the dust of the earth rather than the fruit
of some dirty damn ape’s loins. Hell, half the field of Republican
candidates will tell you the Earth itself is 6,000 years old.

Today you’d have a hard time striking up politics
in a bar and finding a drinker who doesn’t think all this War on
Terror huff and Homeland Security stuff is a waste of bad time and good
money. It’s up with the Drug War as something to be mocked when
some particularly egregious example of fraud and skullduggery makes the
papers, but otherwise to be ignored. Both the laughter and the lack of
interest otherwise spring from the same unfortunate perception: that this
shit is just implacable, as much a fact of life as death, taxes, and gravity.

I say unfortunate perception, but I can’t call
it untrue. Do Americans recognize that the domestic security apparatus
is a cracked panopticon whose endless maintenance serves only to line
the pockets of the powers in our Sovietized system of State Capital and
occasionally to exact petty revenge on poor, powerless peaceniks and other
assorted losers whose eternal response to the United States of Pepper
Spray and Tasers is to complain that it is all horribly, horribly unfair,
and to erect, without apparent irony, towering monuments of rhetorical
indignation that dissent should bring reprisal in America as it does in
every other society on earth—ever? Sure they do. What are they going
to do about it? More and better Democrats?

The well-meaning and thoroughly moronic optimists who
now hawk their internet-ready people-powered politics with the predictable
fervor of losers trapped in a pyramid scheme from which escape means ruin,
the folks who populate websites like DailyKos, who give money to MoveOn.org,
who persist in the belief that deliverance will come in the form of electoral
politics, are the exemplars of this error. They think of themselves as
the empire’s irritants, agitating for a better, fairer, juster world
in which slicker politicians will keep from them the dirty truths about
the maintenance of their comfortable lives, when so clearly they remain
its enablers.

The question before us is not how we get more and better,
but more and worse. I don’t mean worse in the sense of Iran-slavering
Joe Lieberman, say, or Iran-slavering Hillary Clinton. I mean worse in
the sense of Mayor Luke Ravenstahl. I mean: How do we stuff the public
coffers with dishonest losers who will grind the gears of the state and
its security apparatus through sheer, ham-fisted, dumbassed graft. How
do we ensure that the police will take our bribes, that the city council
will blow Homeland Security funds on Vegas hookers, that our local black
markets will proliferate? Dissidence, if it’s to be practiced in
our terrible, powerful country, is going to be practiced in the provinces.
The path to liberty lies in misappropriation.